Essays

It is difficult to imagine scenes more politically relevant at this very moment than these photos from America’s great grasslands. The pivotal period for most of these places occurred in a time that is a close parallel to our own…

This book had to be called Grasslands because of discontinuity. The truthful S at the end of the word reinforces our knowledge that a once-vast Grassland existed on this continent before the onset of Manifest Destiny.

There was something mesmerizing about the way heartland sod rolled off the moldboards of a gang plow. You’d twist around in your tractor seat to behold the absolute continuum of the transformation of sod to dirt.

To the people who know it only as “flyover country,” it is a flat, barren land. They are wrong about this, as anyone who has walked or even driven the high plains and the Palouse Prairie knows. Roads wind and wrap wide, round hills.